Author: Andy Balaam

Podcasts I listen to

I use a modestly-modified BashPodder to download my podcasts (Internet radio shows) automatically every night, and sort them into different directories. If anyone is interested in my modifications, do ask and I can send them to you. I haven’t sent them to Linc since there seem to be a million modifications, which probably do everything mine do, but better. The only modestly interesting thing I added was the ability to convert from m4a format to mp3 automatically, and that doesn’t seem to work, and the Adam Curry PodFinder show is so bad that I realised I didn’t want to be able to do it anyway (note no link since it’s really not worth it).

Anyway, that brings me on to my main point, which is that I have subscribed to a lot of podcasts, and unsubscribed to a lot too. I have now honed my list to ones that I really like, so why not share?

  • LugRadio – excellent Linux show that even my wife enjoys (she is not in the least interested in Linux) because the four (British) presenters are really funny.
  • Poker Diagram – two British guys playing online poker and talking about it. I’ve learnt a lot about poker from this, and really enjoy listening to it. Of no interest to someone who doesn’t know Texas Hold’Em poker pretty well, as it’s tricky to follow just by audio description.
  • The Linux Link Tech Show – US Linux show that is broadcast live, and then podcast unedited. Not in the least professional, but entertaining if you are interested in Linux and/or like listening to the ramblings of some totally ordinary Americans. It’s not so often that you get to hear from real people in America, instead of TV stereotypes, and I like that aspect of it as well as some interviews with interesting people.
  • Mark Kermode – really funny film reviews originally broadcast on the UK’s Radio 5 (which I would never listen to, since all my radios are permanently tuned to Radio 4). I really trust his opinions, and I love to hear him destroy bad films. It’s remarkable that a true horror fan has managed to get himself a show on national radio, and not just reviewing horror films, but all films. He, as he is the first to admit, is always right.
  • From Our Own Correspondent – fascinating “personal reflections” by BBC correspondents who are living in all kinds of interesting places. Journalists, who often have to hold back poetic thoughts to be impartial, are allowed to do whatever they like on this programme, and the results are often very moving, and almost always the kind of thing you talk to people at work about the next day.
  • Mashup Town – because I am in with the kids. Occasionally has a really good song e.g. the mashup of Eminem with The White Stripes that was amazing and I accidentally deleted. Email it to me if you’ve got it.

Basically everything else I’ve listened to is almost completely not worth it.

Look out this year for loads of corporate AdvertCasts and avoid them.

Setting up my ideal email system 4

Sending mail

I used to do something clever with sendmail, but then spamcop blocked my computer because it apparently wasn’t set up properly, so now I use my ISP’s smtp server like everyone else. When I need to tunnel in I simply create a tunnel from localhost’s port 25 to my isp’s smtp server’s port 25, and set localhost as my smtp server on the machine from which I am tunneling. It works fine, and there was really no need to use my own sendmail in the first place, it turns out.

Next time: how I made my own webmail server.

TODO for this blog:

  • FreeGuide update
  • My poker analysis program

Setting up my ideal email system 3

Fetchmail setup

My ISP provides my email by POP3, so I use fetchmail to download it every 10 minutes. I created a file .fetchmailrc file in my home directory that looks like this:

# Configuration created Wed Jul 27 06:43:07 2005 by fetchmailconf
set postmaster "andy"
set bouncemail
set no spambounce
set properties ""
poll mail.myisp.co.uk with proto POP3
user 'andy@myisp.co.uk' there with password 'password' is 'andy' here

This tells fetchmail to use the username and password given to me by my ISP to download mail into the default location for the user andy on the local machine. This would normally put my mail into /var/spool/mail/andy, or something like that, but to get it into my Maildir (which I talked about in a previous blog entry), I added these lines to a .procmailrc in my home directory:

MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
LOGFILE=$MAILDIR/log

Now when I type the command fetchmail (logged in as andy) I get something like this:

$ fetchmail
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: Server CommonName mismatch: localhost != mail.myisp.co.uk
fetchmail: No mail for andy@myisp.co.uk at mail.myisp.co.uk

(No idea how to get rid of those errors, but they don’t seem to cause any problems.) And if any mail was found, it appears in my Inbox in Thunderbird, as if by magic.

Next time: how I send mail, using sendmail.

FreeGuide 0.10pre2

So I’ve put out FreeGuide version 0.10pre2, and then a little bug-fix release because the Linux RPMs were broken. By calling this 0.10pre2-2 I managed to annoy my faithful Gentoo packager Christian, and myself, but at the time it seemed too much hassle to bump everytjing up to 0.10pre3.

The next release, 0.10.3, is going to be stable, and everyone is finally going to be using and testing our latest code stream. We’ve had a few bugs reported again 0.10pre2, and we’ve already got a couple to fix, and then we’re going to push it out asap and get everyone migrated up.

I hope people will like the new version – it’s a lot faster, and the UI experience is better (in my opinion). I just hope there aren’t too many wrinkles in the upgrade path.

Alex has written some good upgrade code, but some of the concepts have changed, and I’m not entirely happy with the depths you have to delve into the Options screen just to play with your XMLTV grabber, but most things should “Just Work” for normal users.

After 0.10.3, I really want to get recording working, using Reuel’s plugin. If anyone wants to send me a UK digital TV card, you can be sure it would be put to good use…